A year of anniversaries

There have been an extraordinary number of significant anniversaries this year.

We have had

The 800th anniversary of the sealing of Magna Carta

The 200th anniversary of the battle of Waterloo

The 100th anniversary of the Gallipoli campaign

Within WWII we have had the 75th anniversaries of the Dunkirk evacuation and Battle of Britain, and the 70th anniversaries of VE day, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb attacks, and VJ day.

The year also sees the 300th anniversary of the first Jacobite rising, culminating in the Jacobite defeat at the battle of Preston which we will commemorate on 14th November

And tomorrow is of course the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt in 1415.

According to this morning's Times the French, having previously attempted to claim that Waterloo should not really be considered a French defeat (see "How the French won Waterloo (or think they did) by Stephen Clarke" for an amusing take on this,) are now trying to make a celebration of Agincourt on the grounds that the provost-marshal of the defeated French army, Gallois de Fougieres, was the first Gendarme, and therefore they are celebrating 600 years of the French Gendarmarie ...

Only in France ...

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